STTR Phase II: Improving Privacy and Security in Biometrics

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project aims to make fundamental advances in Biotopes -- cryptographically secured privacy-enhanced fingerprint and face-based technologies. The project will develop prototypes to support beta testing in commercial applications and pursue large-scale government testing. The development effort introduces the concept and will develop/demonstrate bi-directional biometric verification, whereby both the sensor and DB receive match confirmation. This is critical for remote/web-based biometric usage and improves security and privacy with match-on-card solutions. It will develop a new Biotope which uses, but never stores, multi-spectral data not obtainable from existing databases or from latent prints, providing a sustainable non-spoofable secured identity tokens that match in encoded form and change on every transaction. It will explore improving accuracy with 'negative' minutiae and PCA-based feature enhancements. To improve reuse of existing minutia-based algorithms and hardware, the effort seeks to develop a minutiae-to-minutiae mapping approach with the same security/privacy protection of existing Biotopes. For face-based biometrics, the project develops new multi-view approaches for face-based verification from non-cooperative subjects in complex unstructured environments. Additionally, the project addresses privacy protection, with a non-searchable technology that still supports a privacy-protecting image-storage for fraud prosecution, and will extend other research work in the area of continuous verification by improving the online verification for distance education and other applications. The broader impact starts with its unique focus on simultaneously improving privacy and security rather than trading one for the other. At a time when citizens feel their privacy is traded for the mere promise of security, this effort is an investment in privacy. The project will transition fundamental research into testing with commercial partners. It directly addresses reasons that other researchers have said cause the perpetual gap between predicted and realized commercial growth in biometrics. It will enhance biometrics, providing 'revocability' and transactional uniqueness to support biometric-based commerce without fear of phishing, hacking or insider access. The project will impact the distance education market for example, by focusing on improving effectiveness of state training for those in need while protecting their privacy and dignity. The projected outcomes also open the potential for passports/IDcard that allow individuals to prove their identity without allowing others to use that data to search for them. It will support smart-card based solutions that allow for biometric-verified yet 'anonymous' transactions. It addresses the often overlooked biometric dilemma, that wide-spread deployments of biometrics today may ultimately increase identify theft and also limit biometrics security value tomorrow.